Is Cheating a Lucrative Business for College Students?

[Astronuc]

Florida college professor gives cheating business students an ultimatum - confess, retake the test and attend an ethics class, or don't graduate.
http://news.yahoo.com/video/business-15749628/students-busted-for-cheating-22954742

Everyone doesn't.

 

[Grep]

Wow, that's disgusting.

What really astounds me is the kid justifying it with something like "everybody cheats, it's just a witch hunt". Seems like he has some serious issues. I can truly say I've never, ever cheated on tests. And I figure the business world is better off without people like that. I swear you'd have to be some kind of sociopath to say something like that.

I feel really sorry for the professor. I also feel really sorry for the ~ 400 students that have to retake the exam because 1/3 of the class are cheaters. The prof is being really nice in allowing them to take the test again and take an ethics class, IMO.

 

[BobG]

The prof is being really nice in allowing them to take the test again and take an ethics class, IMO.

Identifying an abnormally high average to confirm other suspicions (the answer key left in his bin) is a strong indication that many students cheated. Identifying which students is another thing entirely. The options given are a realistic assessment that they would have a very hard time identifying which students cheated.

Of course, since about 150 people accepted his offer and admitted cheating, it's almost certain that a significant number of the admitted cheaters will reveal enough details about the cheating that most of those that didn't admit cheating will get caught, too.

A real life 'Prisoner's Dilemma', except with 200 participants instead of only two. The number of conspirators tilts the odds a bit heavily.

Ironically, if the student claiming all students cheat were correct, the professor wouldn't have seen much difference in the scores for the test in question.

 

[rootX]

This professor is just making big drama. I don't know how solutions were passed to the students but was it his fault? He can easily make a really hard final exam and bring average down to the normal level.

I remember once at my sister's university, a professor posted solutions online by mistake before the exam. Everyone did very good on the exam.

For final, professor engineered a really hard exam that put everyone back to their normal marks.

 

[BobG]

I wonder how many didn't cheat, but confessed anyway. If a student did much better on the exam than they usually do, they probably were feeling a little nervous.

The worst case of admitting to cheating when they hadn't was to lose an abnormally high score, take an ethics class, plus suffer moral indignation at confessing to something they didn't do.

The worst case of being wrongly found guilty of cheating was not to graduate, plus the moral indignation of being found guilty of a crime they didn't commit.

Avoiding a really bad worst case scenario is often times better than achieving the best scenario (one good test score that wouldn't change their overall average significantly). The choice could come down to how the student perceives the school will catch the cheaters. If there were a feeling that an abnormally high test score alone could be all the evidence the school needed, then the student would certainly be tempted to admit to something they didn't actually do.

 

[D H]

Whoo boy. "Every cheats".

We used statistical techniques to detect cheaters 30 years ago when I TAed an intro computer science class. Our solution was simple: We graded the assignment or test as-is and then divided the score evenly amongst the cheaters. Four people cheated on an assignment: Their mediocre 80 turned into a 20. Two people cheated on an exam: Their fantastic 96 turned into a 48. Ouch!

 

[waht]

How about changing homework assignments, and test questions every semester. That's what many of my profs did.

 

[CRGreathouse]

We used statistical techniques to detect cheaters 30 years ago when I TAed an intro computer science class. Our solution was simple: We graded the assignment or test as-is and then divided the score evenly amongst the cheaters. Four people cheated on an assignment: Their mediocre 80 turned into a 20. Two people cheated on an exam: Their fantastic 96 turned into a 48. Ouch!

And if one person cheats?

 

[D H]

If 200 people cheated on the final they would have each received at most half a point out of 100. That would pretty much be a guaranteed F, by about 69 1/2 points, and that is assuming that those 200 students somehow managed to get a perfect score. One of the weird things we discovered about the cheaters was that their original, unaltered scores tended to be rather low. Dividing those scores by some integer>1 made them low, low, low. Cheaters back then were not only unethical, they were, well, stupid.Oh! Missed what you were asking. Catching one person cheating was not something our statistical techniques could handle. Those problems were handled by the professor.

 

[lisab]

How about changing homework assignments, and test questions every semester. That's what many of my profs did.

Hear, hear!

 

[rootX]

How about changing homework assignments, and test questions every semester. That's what many of my profs did.

Not practical: time intensive, solutions are often incorrect.

 

[D H]

Hear, hear!

But then how are all the frat boys and jocks going to graduate?

 

[JaredJames]

Not practical: time intensive, solutions are often incorrect.

Says a lot about the teacher (or person setting the test) then doesn't it.

My university lecturers change the questions every exam. So to say it isn't practical is non-sense. The choice is either have new questions each exam and reduce the risk of cheating or re-use questions and risk unrealistic test scores.

 

[rootX]

My university lecturers change the questions every exam.

I was not talking about exams but minor assignments: homework assignments, small tests etc. It is rare in upper years to grade homework assignments, neither there are any small quizes. It's only labs, midterms, and final exams.

 

[waht]

Hear, hear!

I hear the professors go over syllabus at the start of every semester, and particularly plagiarism and cheating policy.

 

[waht]

I was not talking about exams but minor assignments: homework assignments, small tests etc. It is rare in upper years to grade homework assignments, neither there are any small quizes. It's only labs, midterms, and final exams.

True, it's impossible to cheat in sciences and engineering. You either know how to solve a problem step-by-step or you don't.

 

[JaredJames]

I was not talking about exams but minor assignments: homework assignments, small tests etc. It is rare in upper years to grade homework assignments, neither there are any small quizes. It's only labs, midterms, and final exams.

OK, perhaps should have clarified. They don't give duplicate questions in exams, in-class tests or assignments.

The only things that remain the same are the lab reports, but they don't count for much of your final score (5%).

I took homework assignments to be assignments. (Not small pieces of work you are given each day/week etc, but actual assignments that count to your final result.)

We don't get weekly homework.

 

[D H]

True, it's impossible to cheat in sciences and engineering. You either know how to solve a problem step-by-step or you don't.

That's a bit naive. Computer science students will submit the same program, changing names and comments to hide the fact that they cheated. Similar kinds of cheating appear in all kinds of classes. Cheaters can be very creative in creating new ways to cheat. Old ways also work well. Fraternities are notorious for keeping copies of exams on file. If the professor doesn't change the exam every semester, all the members have to do is have a cheat sheet that tells them the answers.

Changing exams is hard. The questions need to be appropriate to the material. The exam should not be too hard or too easy. The instructor needs to anticipate all the ways that the question can be answered incorrectly so that partial credit can be given. This final factor makes developing a test an extremely difficult task.

 

[BobG]

Whoo boy. "Every cheats".

We used statistical techniques to detect cheaters 30 years ago when I TAed an intro computer science class. Our solution was simple: We graded the assignment or test as-is and then divided the score evenly amongst the cheaters. Four people cheated on an assignment: Their mediocre 80 turned into a 20. Two people cheated on an exam: Their fantastic 96 turned into a 48. Ouch!

That describes how you handled cheaters, not how you statistically detected them.

I'm curious how you could detect individual cheaters using statistical techniques. That kind of technique would come in handy in predicting when a baseball batter's hot streaks or cold streaks would come to an end, when a given poker hand was guaranteed to win, and in predicting when long strings of 'heads' would occur during coin flips.

The idea seems counter-intuitive.

It isn't completely off the wall since most questions can be evaluated by who misses them. Ideally, a question is a good test question if the high scorers (top third, for example) almost always get the question right, the average scorers (middle third?) get the question right a good percentage of the time, and low scorers are the most likely to miss a particular question. No one writes a perfect test and there will always be a few easy questions everyone gets right and a few hard questions even the good students are likely to miss. An individual missing the easy questions and getting the hard questions right would look pretty suspicious. I still don't think that would hold up as proof that particular student cheated.

 

[waht]

That's a bit naive. Computer science students will submit the same program, changing names and comments to hide the fact that they cheated. Similar kinds of cheating appear in all kinds of classes. Cheaters can be very creative in creating new ways to cheat. Old ways also work well. Fraternities are notorious for keeping copies of exams on file. If the professor doesn't change the exam every semester, all the members have to do is have a cheat sheet that tells them the answers.

Changing exams is hard. The questions need to be appropriate to the material. The exam should not be too hard or too easy. The instructor needs to anticipate all the ways that the question can be answered incorrectly so that partial credit can be given. This final factor makes developing a test an extremely difficult task.

Writing programs would count as homework, or some project. But the exam is still on theory, and bits of selected code that could be easily changed, swapped or renamed.

The classic example is a prof that rescheduled an exam for next week because he was still working on the exam questions. Alot of times professors improvise as they go, and some like to play around.

I'm not disputing the tough job that a professor has from preparing a lecture, delivering it and making sure everything is on track. In fact I respect it.

 

[rootX]

It isn't completely off the wall since most questions can be evaluated by who misses them. Ideally, a question is a good test question if the high scorers (top third, for example) almost always get the question right, the average scorers (middle third?) get the question right a good percentage of the time, and low scorers are the most likely to miss a particular question. No one writes a perfect test and there will always be a few easy questions everyone gets right and a few hard questions even the good students are likely to miss. An individual missing the easy questions and getting the hard questions right would look pretty suspicious. I still don't think that would hold up as proof that particular student cheated.

I love bell curve approach!

My most exams are such that you can take book to the exam and still fail the exam if you don't know your material. For engineering, it would take few hours (along with good sleep) to get prepared to pass the course but it is nearly impossible to individually cheat.

 

[Pengwuino]

Not practical: time intensive, solutions are often incorrect.

You change the numbers. The best thing about cheaters are that they're idiots most of the time. You change a few numbers in a physics test and MOST students, cheaters or not, will think you've made the problem completely different.

In regards to what someone mentioned earlier about people confessing even if they didn't cheat, here's the solution: Retake a test! Immediately (within a couple days) of the first one. Given a new test, if a student didn't cheat, their score shouldn't change by much. If someone did cheat, you should see scores plummet. Boom. Cheater.

 

[D H]

As I mentioned earlier, our techniques could not detect individual cheaters. Since it was 30 years ago, here is what we did:

For programming assignments we used statistics from the the compiler to find cheats: heap size, maximum stack size, and number of tokens. We sorted submissions, by hand (TAs are cheap), by heap size then by stack size. We used number of tokens and visual inspection to eliminate false positives (amazingly we had very few false positives). All of the standard tricks such as changing symbol names or inserting spurious comments didn't help the cheaters one bit.

For tests we selected the two questions of the type "write a program segment to ..." and that counted the most as exemplars. In addition to grading the answers we also had to count the number of words in the answers to those exemplars. We sorted by word count (binned sort/subsort). Total score and visual scrutiny helped us weed out the false positives, and once again we had very few false positives.

Easy to beat? Yes. Since this was a bust-out course, word on how to cheat didn't seem to filter down from year to year.

 

[DanP]

Florida college professor gives cheating business students an ultimatum - confess, retake the test and attend an ethics class, or don't graduate.
http://news.yahoo.com/video/business-15749628/students-busted-for-cheating-22954742

Everyone doesn't.

Frankly, you should be stupid to confess for something which cannot be proven. Mind some posts above , heuristics are not proof. And no college professor should be given the arbitrary power to force students to retake a test. One test. Its your fault you are not able to supervise the test. Don't harass anyone with retakes to excuse yours or your staff incompetence. You as a teacher failed the university, failed the students and yourself if you are powerless to stop cheating in ONE exam.

You was cheated by X hundred students ? Your fault. Eat it up, and learn your lessons for next year. Dont complain.

 

[zomgwtf]

Wow, that's disgusting.

What really astounds me is the kid justifying it with something like "everybody cheats, it's just a witch hunt". Seems like he has some serious issues. I can truly say I've never, ever cheated on tests. And I figure the business world is better off without people like that. I swear you'd have to be some kind of sociopath to say something like that.

I feel really sorry for the professor. I also feel really sorry for the ~ 400 students that have to retake the exam because 1/3 of the class are cheaters. The prof is being really nice in allowing them to take the test again and take an ethics class, IMO.

It makes you a sociopath to say that everybody has cheated before? lol...?


I'd say that the majority of people in life have definitely cheated in school at some point in time. The vast majority even. I know that I did back in math, make a cheat sheet with worked examples I knew would be on the test slide it in my calculator. Or even just using my calculators ability to solve quadratics and cubics and even higher powers to check my final answers is cheating.

Anyways the students got A HOLD of the final answers. That's the profs fault. If I somehow got a hold of answers to an exam I sure as hell would use them. I didn't hear anything stated showing that students stole the answers or something, they just somehow got them. I remember in high school math tests were the same year to year, is it cheating that I could study off my older friends tests?

As well these methods used to catch the cheaters seem kinda iffy. I do not think there's any way to catch a cheater by using statistics. You either catch them in real life or not. Not in theory.

 

[Pengwuino]

It makes you a sociopath to say that everybody has cheated before? lol...?

According to *random source I forgot*, one of the characteristics of sociopaths is that they believe everybody else is just as bad as them but won't admit it.

Anyways the students got A HOLD of the final answers. That's the profs fault. If I somehow got a hold of answers to an exam I sure as hell would use them. I didn't hear anything stated showing that students stole the answers or something, they just somehow got them. I remember in high school math tests were the same year to year, is it cheating that I could study off my older friends tests?

As well these methods used to catch the cheaters seem kinda iffy. I do not think there's any way to catch a cheater by using statistics. You either catch them in real life or not. Not in theory.

This kind of thinking scares the hell out of me. If someone accidentally leaves their keys to their car on the door and someone steals it, the person who stole the car is off the hook? Well I better start installing a 5 ton safe in my house for my valuables because apparently if I don't, it'll be my fault when someone steals them.

Can you imagine using this logic in the real world? An investor looses his retirement because his mutual funds bought a bunch of mortgages that were crap? Well that's too bad, the investor should have gone out and gotten appraisals for every house that had a mortgage purchased to it. Someone threw out a bank statement with important information and had their identity stolen? Well if someone was rummaging through their garbage and ran into it, they should feel obligated to steal the persons identity!

Ridiculous. Stop trying to rationalize things you know were wrong to do.

 

[Grep]

It makes you a sociopath to say that everybody has cheated before? lol...?

I pretty much agree with Pengwuino. Though I'd just add that I in no way imply a serious diagnosis and I'm not a psychologist, etc. But I seriously think there's at least a little bit of something wrong with someone who would talk like that kid. A lot of people have a good sense of ethics. Two thirds did indeed do their own work (leaving aside the validity of the teacher's detection method, which I don't know).

Anyways, I'd kill to be able to go to University and study right now. It's a privilege to be able to go there and learn, and students who cheat are only cheating themselves, IMO. If they learned it, which is pretty much the point of the whole thing, they wouldn't have to cheat. On this, I'm guessing, we can all mostly agree. But it's really the way I feel about it.

 

[Vanadium 50]

There seems to be an assumption that the cheating involved a recycled test. Is there any evidence for this?

The worst case of "bulk cheating" I am aware of involved some students breaking into the professor's office to get a copy of the exam, not test recycling.

 

[Pengwuino]

Here is the lecture where he confronts everyone.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Doing a little reading on the web, it appears that one student handed in the answer key with his test. It also appears that the test is given by computer in a central testing center, and a third party who is somehow involved in this operation was selling the answers: the high-tech version of bribing the secretary who mimeographed the test.

 

[bp_psy]

Fraternities are notorious for keeping copies of exams on file. If the professor doesn't change the exam every semester, all the members have to do is have a cheat sheet that tells them the answers.

Weird the library at my university has an extensive final exam archive and most of the professors make their past midterms available.There is no problem with that since no professor would give the same exam twice.

Changing exams is hard. The questions need to be appropriate to the material. The exam should not be too hard or too easy. The instructor needs to anticipate all the ways that the question can be answered incorrectly so that partial credit can be given. This final factor makes developing a test an extremely difficult task.

Who cares?It is the professors responsibility to ensure that the test is fair for everyone.If it is to much for him then he shouldn't teach the course.

 

[D H]

You as a teacher failed the university, failed the students and yourself if you are powerless to stop cheating in ONE exam..

The failures here are the students and modern society. IMO those students should be busted. Out of school, no transfer credits elsewhere, restart life from scratch. I do not want to live in a caged society where people will cheat unless prevented from doing so by incredibly intrusive preventive measures. I want to live in a free society. That requires that people for the most part will not cheat. Instilling a strong moral compass helps in that regard. So does fear of punishment for those who lack a moral compass.

"All people cheat." No, they don't. Some people are still quite honest by their nature and upbringing.

 

[xxChrisxx]

I don't get it. So were the answers circulated or the bank of 700 test questions?
Also did people have the solutions whilst they were taking the test?

It's an important distinction to make as to wether it was technically cheating or not. Also is this multiple choice or something? 700 questions is a hell of a lot to work through otherwise.

 

[rhody]

Interesting give and take here. Let's take it out of the testing arena and apply it to a midterm research assignment contributing to a large portion of the student's grade.

Hypothetically, let's say a student reads a summary of a substantial amount of research by a PF member, then cherry picks the best ideas summarized in the person's post and is rewarded for his/her efforts with an excellent grade, having done none of the fact checking, organizing, prioritizing on their own.

Is this cheating, to "prey" off the hard work of another, or is it creative "research mining" ?

Rhody...

 

[JaredJames]

I thought that was plagiarism. To pass off someone elses work as your own.

The students were wrong to cheat, but the professor should take more care and ensure they discourage cheating (changing questions, better security of papers etc).

If you give the opportunity for the students to cheat, chances are they will go for it.

It doesn't take that much effort on the teachers part to change some numbers / names in questions. Although it's only a basic change, the average cheater isn't going to equate it to a similar question as easily.

A good teacher will change every question each year. My uni does this and they also provide all past papers for study.

EDIT: Then again, I suppose if they referenced the PF member they can get around that. But that may have an effect on their mark if it can be seen not to be theirs, at all.

 

[rhody]

I thought that was plagiarism. To pass off someone elses work as your own.

EDIT: Then again, I suppose if they referenced the PF member they can get around that. But that may have an effect on their mark if it can be seen not to be theirs, at all.

jared,

I think plagiarism would apply if the person had used the PF's members conclusions in the paper as their own. If they had listed the source as the PF member and given them credit for their conclusion's and adding their own to it, then I guess that would fly. Would be interesting to see what the professor would do in that situation though.

Rhody...

 

[BobG]

Interesting give and take here. Let's take it out of the testing arena and apply it to a midterm research assignment contributing to a large portion of the student's grade.

Hypothetically, let's say a student reads a summary of a substantial amount of research by a PF member, then cherry picks the best ideas summarized in the person's post and is rewarded for his/her efforts with an excellent grade, having done none of the fact checking, organizing, prioritizing on their own.

Is this cheating, to "prey" off the hard work of another, or is it creative "research mining" ?

Rhody...

Depends on whether you're being loose with terminology and really mean a midterm report vs a research assignment.

For a report, a student is almost always summarizing the research or work of others, ranging from summarizing a particular person's work all the way to comparing the research of several people in order to draw conclusions that may not have been obvious to the individual researchers.

For a research assignment, the student should be doing their own research, not reporting on the research of others.

If you mean the latter, I would expect quite a few to misinterpret what you mean, since it's a subtle difference many miss, especially since finding and reading the research of others is considered research for a report.

But I think the example you give would be a report comparing the research of others - except the student in this case didn't actually do the comparing. He merely reported the results of someone else's report. It might not be plagiarism, per se, but I wouldn't think it would yield a particularly high grade, since the student didn't meet the objectives of the assignment - i.e. learn how to analyze and compare research and then synthesize them into a completely new idea. That would be an important skill to have when managing and planning an engineering project, for example.

It really depends what level class the assignment is for and what you expect out of the students (in other words, in high school or lower level college classes, the objective might be just to expose students to how other people analyze and compare research).

 

[DanP]

The failures here are the students and modern society. IMO those students should be busted.

Sure, if you can catch the ones who cheated and bring proof, punish them :P If not, that's it, nobody gives you the right to force all your students to retake an exam and take an ethics class. Remember: Innocent until caught :P And blame for cheating can't be assigned collectively: you need to single out the ones who did it and bring proof.

I do not want to live in a caged society where people will cheat unless prevented from doing so by incredibly intrusive preventive measures. I want to live in a free society. That requires that people for the most part will not cheat. Instilling a strong moral compass helps in that regard. So does fear of punishment for those who lack a moral compass.

You live in today's society. Maybe there ain't perfect, but is very little you can do about it.
Some humans will always cheat.

"All people cheat." No, they don't. Some people are still quite honest by their nature and upbringing.

Sure, you can't say that 100% of all humans cheat. However, during my life I seen that huge percentages of humans I came in contact with will cheat in one way or another if given the opportunity during their lives. Many times in what they believe to be harmless ways.

 

[lisab]

Sure, if you can catch the ones who cheated and bring proof, punish them :P If not, that's it, nobody gives you the right to force all your students to retake an exam and take an ethics class. Remember: Innocent until caught :P And blame for cheating can't be assigned collectively: you need to single out the ones who did it and bring proof.

I think you're wrong here. From my experience, professors have tremendous leeway in how they run the class.

 

[D H]

I would assume that tests formed from a test bank are well-calibrated. This brand-spankin' new test is uncalibrated. Suppose only the cheaters retake the test. Lacking a calibration of the test, how can the instructor map test scores to grades? Forcing the non-cheaters to also retake the test provides the needed calibration -- and has the side benefit of creating a good deal of animosity on the side of the non-cheaters toward the cheaters.

 

[rhody]

Depends on whether you're being loose with terminology and really mean a midterm report vs a research assignment.

For a report, a student is almost always summarizing the research or work of others, ranging from summarizing a particular person's work all the way to comparing the research of several people in order to draw conclusions that may not have been obvious to the individual researchers.

For a research assignment, the student should be doing their own research, not reporting on the research of others.

If you mean the latter, I would expect quite a few to misinterpret what you mean, since it's a subtle difference many miss, especially since finding and reading the research of others is considered research for a report.

But I think the example you give would be a report comparing the research of others - except the student in this case didn't actually do the comparing. He merely reported the results of someone else's report. It might not be plagiarism, per se, but I wouldn't think it would yield a particularly high grade, since the student didn't meet the objectives of the assignment - i.e. learn how to analyze and compare research and then synthesize them into a completely new idea. That would be an important skill to have when managing and planning an engineering project, for example.

It really depends what level class the assignment is for and what you expect out of the students (in other words, in high school or lower level college classes, the objective might be just to expose students to how other people analyze and compare research).

Bob,

Lets say research assignment, back to my original question then:

Is this cheating, to "prey" off the hard work of another, or is it creative "research mining" ?

Is it plagiarism even if credit is given by the student to the source, what would the professor's options be given this circumstance ?

Rhody...

 

[DanP]

I think you're wrong here. From my experience, professors have tremendous leeway in how they run the class.

They have. Now this guys wants to abuse this power. Someone should stop him. Its his and his staff failure he can't identify the cheaters. I would be very pissed off on this man, should he force those antics on me moths before graduation. Prove that I cheated. If you are unable, leave me and my colleagues alone.

 

[Pengwuino]

Sure, if you can catch the ones who cheated and bring proof, punish them :P If not, that's it, nobody gives you the right to force all your students to retake an exam and take an ethics class. Remember: Innocent until caught :P And blame for cheating can't be assigned collectively: you need to single out the ones who did it and bring proof.

As lisa said, professors can do whatever they want if it's not forbidden by their syllabus. There are no "rights" against having to take an exam twice. It's like the idea that you can't be forced to take 3 or more finals or exams on the same day. That is "widely believed" at my university but the fact of the matter is that no such rule exists; students just make up "rights" for themselves when it feels right. I've even heard professors telling students that they won't reschedule the exam for them when they were in that situation (though one of the others did so it was fine in the end).

 

[Pengwuino]

Is it plagiarism even if credit is given by the student to the source, what would the professor's options be given this circumstance ?

If someone is given credit, I don't feel that it's plagiarism. However, if a student just copies, pastes, and cites large amounts of someone elses work, then it's just a poorly done assignment worthy of a bad grade.

 

[DanP]

As lisa said, professors can do whatever they want if it's not forbidden by their syllabus. .

Forcing someone to take an ethic class ? Is that in the syllabus of a phsysics major for example ? How do you justify imposing an ethic class on me months before graduation ?Hiding your incompetence with forcing hundreds of ppl to retake and exam ? Again, fail. Someone should stop this man. There is no reason to retake the exam. I took it once and I was graded. Sorry.

 

[Gokul43201]

They have. Now this guys wants to abuse this power. Someone should stop him. Its his and his staff failure he can't identify the cheaters. I would be very pissed off on this man, should he force those antics on me moths before graduation. Prove that I cheated. If you are unable, leave me and my colleagues alone.

The university/department rules will determine if the teacher is abusing his powers. Given that this hasn't come up, and that he isn't being reprimanded or fired for a breach of rules, it seems likely that he is entirely within the guidelines to make the class retake the test.

If you don't like the rules, take your colleagues with you and leave the school.

 

[mathwonk]

after a lifetime of trying to stop cheating, i began to just help people on tests by answering questions and giving hints. they had no reason to look on their friends paper, since i was even a better source of help, and if anyone looked puzzled i asked them if they needed a hint.

if a hint seemed useful to many people, i would write the hint on the board for everyone. grades didn't change much, and i treated it as learning and teaching experience.

 

[JaredJames]

My maths lecturer had a good view (at least I believe).

He pointed out (quite rightly) that in life you aren't expected to remember everything. You will have reference materials available to you.

So all of his exams had reference materials provided by him.

 

[Pengwuino]

Forcing someone to take an ethic class ? Is that in the syllabus of a phsysics major for example ? How do you justify imposing an ethic class on me months before graduation ?


Hiding your incompetence with forcing hundreds of ppl to retake and exam ? Again, fail. Someone should stop this man. There is no reason to retake the exam. I took it once and I was graded. Sorry.

You do realize he's actually giving these people a chance to not be EXPELLED? He could have just said "ok, you cheated, you've all been reported, have fun working at mcdonalds for the rest of your life".

Yes, someone should stop this man from not letting more liars and cheaters out into the business world. I suppose you enjoy when people lie and cheat you right?

 

[DanP]

The university/department rules will determine if the teacher is abusing his powers. Given that this hasn't come up, and that he isn't being reprimanded or fired for a breach of rules, it seems likely that he is entirely within the guidelines to make the class retake the test.Listen, IMO the professor is nothing by a cheat himself. Individuals who will punish everyone because their own incompetence allow cheaters to exist..He should quit

If events got you, don't whine. Learn for the next year. :P

If you don't like the rules, take your colleagues with you and leave the school.

I sincerely hope that every college student in future will have easy access to lawyers to prevent any abuse whatsoever from the organization they are paying for tuition.

It's nothing but a commercial contract ultimately. You better make sure the university
can live up it;s part of the bargain. And in this case, it seems that it didnt. Large scale cheating is a indication of a weak process and weak professors.

Maybe what those students should do is to make this case publicly all over the internet, hitting hard into the school's image.